Once upon a time there was an active, magnificent train station called Buffalo Central Terminal which served tens of thousands of people per day and more than 200 daily trains at its peak. It housed hundreds of employees for the New York Central Railroad Co., one of America's largest companies, in a landmark 17-story tower above the terminal, as well as in adjoining buildings.
But there was a problem -- several, actually. The station was built where the railroad needed it, not where the public wanted it. It was built at the junction of railroad lines that allowed easy access for trains. But it was two miles east of downtown Buffalo in a working-class Polish neighborhood. And since local mobsters controlled taxi cab companies, they kept a proposed streetcar line from being built into the station making it less accessible. And, worst of all, the station opened on June 22, 1929, four months before the stock market crash and the start of the Great Depression. The massive, ornate and very expensive Buffalo Central Terminal would never reach its full potential.
Just 30 years later, as governments built airports and highway and rail passenger traffic went into a severe decline, New York Central began closing sections of the terminal to save money. NYC merged with its rival Pennsylvania Railroad in 1968 as Penn-Central, went bankrupt several years later, and absorbed into government-owned Conrail in 1976. Amtrak took over passenger operations in 1971 and relocated its eight daily trains to/from Buffalo in 1979 to the old but cozy Exchange Street station downtown and the new and suburban station in Depew. By the early 1980s, there was nothing left at Buffalo Central Terminal but vagrants, vandals and memories....
Halloween 2009 was a fitting day for a tour of the ruins of Central Terminal by a nonprofit group seeking to restore it. I was happy to be part of the small tour. Thanks to Bruce Becker, President of the Empire State Passengers Association for arranging the tour and to Mark Lewandowski, president of the Central Terminal Restoration Corp. for accommodating us. Lewandowski grew up next to the station in the neighborhood that has also fallen on hard times.
Here's where the station is located...
June 22, 1929 was grand opening day. On that day, the station awaited its first train. By the next day, more than 200 trains would have called on the station...
In the late 1940s the station, its track area, support facilities and surrounding neighborhood were all still intact when this aerial view was taken...
In 1944, a New York Central passenger train heads west out of the station bound for Cleveland, Toledo and Chicago...
But scenes like this one during World War II wouldn't last for much more than another 20 years...
And now to today.....Coming up the driveway from Curtiss Street, this is the view I was confronted with...
We are surrounded by ruins...
They are trying to save the station and have made some progress over the past decade. But there is hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work left to do...
And so we enter the station...
This space formerly held a swanky restaurant. You can still see some of the fancy detailing on the wall. But now it is accompanied by graffitti. This space is used for meetings and functions...
From this location, you would have walked out....
....to this concourse over the tracks. But the concourse was severed in 1982 from the station I'm standing inside by Conrail which needed the overhead clearance for its larger freight trains...
One of the persons accompanying us was an aging volunteer from the Empire State Passengers Association. He was in his 70s, a frequent user of this station decades ago, and often stopped to look quietly at certain things like this wrecked passenger services counter. Only he knows the personal memories such scenes triggered....
Then we went upstairs (the elevators are long gone) to the New York Central offices above the station. Some of the offices had views of the station concourses, but only after the frosted glass windows had been broken out by vandals over the past 30 years. Apparently New York Central used frosted glass because it didn't want its employees distracted by sights of the hustle and bustle of its own station...
These are the archaeological remains of New York Central's train dispatching center inside Central Terminal. It controlled the busy mainline tracks west of Syracuse to Niagara Falls. But this was all relocated to a modern dispatching center at Selkirk Yard near Albany. One of our tour companions checks out one of three consoles...
That isn't snow on the floor next to the cold radiator -- it's dust...
Amazingly, the site owners have already hauled away more 300 tons of debris left by Conrail when they abandoned the facility in the early 1980s. But there are still many offices in the tower that look like this...
And so our small tour group asked some final questions of our guide moments before thanking him and saying goodbye...
But just to show that all is not desolate rail-wise in Buffalo, we headed east to Amtrak's Depew Station. On the way, we passed a CSX freight train getting ready to depart Frontier Yard...
The CSX freight caught up to us at Depew, as we held on to our hats and hairpieces on a VERY windy day. Some gusts easily exceeded 50 mph. But the freight train was moving at only about 30 mph...
I'm taking this a bit out of order, but I wanted to end with photographs of a passenger train. When we first arrived in Buffalo to meet our New York friends, we met at Amtrak's Exchange Street station downtown. Minutes after our arrival, Amtrak's "Maple Leaf" from Toronto heading for New York City pulled into this lesser used of Buffalo's two stations...
A few passengers got off and about a dozen got on board. At Depew, dozens more boarded for the dash to the Big Apple...
Even after we left Buffalo on that Halloween and headed west along Lake Erie's southern shore, our thoughts were still with the station whose ghostly chambers rattled and echoed with the sounds of the wind gusts and nothing else. It left a hollow, empty feeling that haunted us all the way back to Cleveland...
